Kiki Smith has used traditional materials, including bronze, papier mache, and hand-blown glass, in her works, as well as less conventional media (human hair, sheep’s wool, ductile iron, string, cheesecloth, beeswax). But here’s one she probably hasn’t used: bread. In Santiago de Chile, sculptor Constanza Puente has created a life-sized self-portrait out of it, to the apparent delight of local pigeons. She’s not the first to explore the yeasty potential of this quotidian material–prisoners and “outsider” artists have long created chewed-bread sculptures–but it’s the message not economics that guides her choice of material. “I chose bread to celebrate the fragility of the human beings,” Puente says–a sentiment Kiki would likely agree with.
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